ViVa Women's History: Introduction

Viva is a current bibliography of women's and gender history in historical and women's studies journals. Articles in English, French, German, Dutch, Scandinavian languages, and, occasionally Spanish, are selected from 180 European, American, Canadian, Asian, Australian and New Zealand journals. All bibliographic descriptions are stored in the ViVa database. It now contains more than 12,000 records describing articles from 1975 onwards. It is online and freely accessible. You can search the database and browse by year of publication.

What's New

Background

ViVa stands for "Vrouwengeschiedenis in het Vaktijdschrift," which is Dutch for "Women's History in Professional Journals." The bibliography was started in 1990 by Els Kloek as a special project at the History Department of the University of Utrecht, in the Netherlands. By selecting and indexing articles on women's history from 50 West European and American scholarly journals, Kloek and her assistants intended to create a reference tool for locating publications in this field and to provide an overview of the development of women's history writing. The bibliography was published in three printed volumes covering 1975-1994 (Els Kloek et al., Vrouwengeschiedenis in het vaktijdschrift: een bibliografie van artikelen, Amsterdam: Historisch Seminarium van de Universiteit van Amsterdam, 1991-1995, 3 vols. Amsterdamse historische reeks 18, 26, 29).

Since 1995 the project has been continued by the International Institute of Social History (www.iisg.nl). The bibliography, now named ViVa, was made available on the web in 1997. Since then an additional 140 journals have been indexed retroactively, and new titles are being added to the online version on an ongoing basis. The complete bibliography, containing titles from 1975 to 2009, is available as a Web database. The address is: www2.iisg.nl/viva/.

Selection of Articles

The compilation consists of articles on women and gender from historical journals and history from women's studies journals. All substantial articles and review essays about women and gender in history are listed in the bibliography. Related topics such as prostitution, witchcraft, housework, sexuality, birth control, infanticide, the family, gynaecology, and masculinity are also included. Apart from these criteria, our choice of journals has been pragmatic: publications that regularly cover women's history are indexed. These are mainly English and American titles, but we would be pleased to include more German and French titles. Please send us your suggestions.

African Titles

ViVa includes citations on women in African history from AfricaBib, the largest Africana database on women in the world on the Internet. For more information about AfricaBib, visit the AfricaBib website. The AfricaBib citations in ViVa refer to articles from 1995 on. They are fully integrated in the ViVa database and can be searched by author, title, year of publication, and journal title. AfricaBib titles cannot be searched by time period, but can be found by selecting "African History (All Periods)" from the "Period" box on the Advanced search screen. AfricaBib titles are displayed separately in the African-History section on the Browse pages.

Compilers and Contributors

ViVa is compiled by Jenneke Quast, staff member of the International Institute of Social History (IISH) Amsterdam, the Netherlands, with the assistance of Ina Hilgers-Marwa (IISH) and Angelika Wank (IISH). Davis Bullwinkle, the compiler of AfricaBib, contributed titles on women in African history. Margaret Tennant, of Massey University (New Zealand), contributes titles from the New Zealand Journal of History. Diane Hawkins, of SUNY Upstate Medical University, Syracuse, NY (USA), contributed titles from the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Medical History and the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences.